AS A HISTORICALLY DETERMINED FORM
OF THE PRODUCTION
OF THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE
p A widespread schemata used to describe the development of science is as follows: antiquity—the origins of scientific development; the European Middle Ages—stagnation and even retreat; the Renaissance—an awakening of interest in science; Galileo and Newton—science already stands on firm ground and begins its triumphal march, an exponential growth continuing to this date. Its future is unlimited, unless it accidentally leads to the self-annihilation of mankind.
p In our opinion this schemata is lacking in historicity. The culture of each epoch as well as the corresponding mode of thought is not incorporated as an historically evolving and distinctive whole. The dominant form of scientific thought is adopted uncritically (or ahistorically, which amounts to the same thing) and made an absolute basis and measure for judgements on past epochs and for propositions concerning the future.
p Therefore, considering for example the European Middle Ages, the historian of science finds "elements of science" among the “debris” of religious mystical ideas, magical incantations, etc. These “elements” are chosen simply for their resemblance to contemporary scientific forms of knowledge and often seem to be ingenious insights anticipating later 136 developments in science. In point of fact these “elements” were part of an entirely different cultural and thought system and played a different role. It is quite possible that progress in the life and thought patterns in this system was fuelled not by these elements but rather by those which the researcher is inclined to call the “debris”.
p As a self-activated and organic system science could not emerge from elements or fragments. We could make, perhaps an analogy with a building made of bricks. This is the manner in which only the so-called mechanistic systems come into being. Contemporary science was born as a whole, granted that initially this whole was insufficiently defined and differentiated. In addition the new in an organic system arises initially as a function which subsequently acquires (in a certain sense “forms”, constitutes) the corresponding structure. Therefore to derive the origins of modern science from antiquity, referring to the Euclidean system, to Archimedes, etc., is just as absurd as it is to search for the origins of capitalism in antiquity, basing oneself on the “facts” of the existence of manufactories, commodities, money capital, legal system, etc.
p We regard contemporary science as a social system carrying out in present-day society the function of producing theoretical knowledge. The word “theoretical” signifies that the result of cognition—knowledge—is fixed in science in the form of theory. Theory is an abstract model of the process under study. As distinct from the mental subject produced in the imagination, theory is a logical model.
p Theory incorporates, on the one hand, logical relations in their generalized form and lacking direct ties with the specific of the given object. On the other hand, it incorporates relations which fix in an ideal (mental) form certain ties and relations pertaining to the object of cognition (to be more precise, its mental “model”). These ties and relations remain constant despite changes in the object within the sphere of its practical utilization. These are like logical invariants of the motion of the object, through which it may be described in a static, that is to say, actually given form. Fixed in an ideal form these invariants are the laws of science. Thanks to this constancy relative to real time the motion of the object can be “modelled” in theory, outside real time, so that the result of this motion in theory is always actually given in implicit form. This circumstance forms the basis for scientific prevision and consequently for the possibility of applying science in practice.
p We will not dwell here on the evaluation of science as a system of scientific institutions, as a sphere of professional 137 activity, or as a productive force. Science appears all these just as it is the totality of theory, the sum of knowledge and the form of social consciousness. The author only wishes to provide a brief description of science as an integral system.
p Contemporary science was given form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in connection with those revolutionary advances in the sphere of material production which led to the development in Western Europe of the commodity capitalist system of social relations.
p While production served the natural-type economy of the Middle Ages, its product preserved the individuality of its producer and consumer. The technology underlying the manufacture of the product also varied to a considerable extent although as a whole it followed a general design worked out over the centuries. Under these conditions it was not connected with logical systems reproducing material processes; indeed no demand for such reproduction (in form both objective and universal as well as adequate to these processes) arose. The theoretical form of knowledge did not stand out on its own; rather it remained contiguous with the forms inherent to art. Knowledge accumulated in production, but it did not take the form of science. Rather it existed as practical recipes, methods and skills, in part accessible to all, and in part making up the secrets of the artisans guilds.
p The emergence and development of the commodity capitalist mode of production had transformed the entire system of material and ideological relations in society. Above all the nature of labour changed fundamentally. In the new conditions specialization was required for the manufacture of one type of commodity, but now in mass quantities. The operations and their succession were repeated unendingly in the production of each unit of a commodity, and acquired the character of an algorithm, permitting the introduction of the division of labour according to operations and the beginnings of the widespread application of machines. Given the above the special skills of labour became more and more abstract, indifferent to individual contribution which had in an earlier period required virtuosity and artistic mastery. Labour was increasingly becoming an abstract activity which was purely mechanical and therefore impersonal and indifferent to its specific form. It was turned into formal or, much the same, a purely material activity.
p We believe that precisely this nature of production (and labour) had led to fundamental changes in the forms of knowledge pre-dating it. The goals of cognition were changed 138 as well as the form in which they were fixed. For the first time in history the socially set goal of cognition became the search for and investigation of the properties, relations and forces of the natural bodies and processes for their inclusion in an artificial system created ny humans—production. Observation and experiment, which came to be regarded as the most important starting points in cognition, began to expand.
p The commodity capitalist mode of production and the system of the social division of labour endemic to it brought into life a new form of knowledge—science. [138•1
p But can we deduce from concrete practical needs and tasks of developing commodity production the emergence of that form of thought which we call science and, consequently, the scientific forms of knowledge? Were the emergence and development of scientific knowledge a direct answer to the needs articulated by this production? Even a brief look at history forces us to give a negative answer to this question. In the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth and the larger part of the nineteenth century production, on the one hand, and science on the other, operated as more or less independent spheres of activity. The situation changed and science began to be transformed into a productive force only in the 1870s and 1880s. We may note modifications in the relationship between science and practice by comparing, for example, the creation of the steam engine (first half of the nineteenth century) and of the atom bomb (middle of the twentieth century). Only after the steam engine had been designed and widely applied did Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot establish a full scientific explanation for it. On the contrary, the atom bomb was first “exploded” in a scientific theoretical sense, and only then was the explosion enacted in real life.
p By all appearances the emergence of science was determined not by the direct and specific goals of commodity production but by the result of its development as a whole. It seems to us that such a general result, determining the transformation of the social process of cognition into that form which we call scientific cognition and, correspondingly, scientific thought, 139 was the world of object relationships engendered by the human activity as something independent of, and even dominant over, the man.
p This dictatorship of the material elements of labour over live labour is realized and established as a result of its capitalist organization. It is precisely the latter which engenders a specific mode of thought as well, the dominant element of which is the thing elevated over man. Concerning such a converted thought-mold, Marx wrote: "Since the economists identify past labour with capital—past labour being understood in this case not only in the sense of concrete labour embodied in the product, but also in the sense of social labour, materialised labour-time—it is understandable that they, the Pindars of capital, emphasise the objective elements of production and overestimate their importance as against the subjective element, living, immediate labour.... The producer is therefore controlled by the product, the subject by the object, labour which is being embodied by labour embodied in an object, etc. In all these conceptions, past labour appears not merely as an objective factor of living labour, subsumed by it, but vice versa; not as an element of the power of living labour, but as a power over this labour. The economists ascribe a false importance to the material factors of labour compared with labour itself in order to have also a technological justification for the specific social form, i.e., the capitalist form, in which the relationship of labour to the conditions of labour is turned upside-down, so that it is not the worker who makes use of the conditions of labour, but the conditions of labour which make use of the worker.” [139•1
p In the natural economy of the Middle Ages the product was put out in the main only as a use value. This signifies that it only existed vis-a-vis a man. If in fact there arose relations between products they did not bear an independent character and were not transformed into a system of materialistics standing independent of humans. Therefore medieval thought only conceived of the relationship “human-thing”, but not of the independent “thing-thing” relationship, for the entire world of things was considered to be but a shadow, a “projection” of the spiritual world.
p The development of commodity production begins with the emergence of a universal market, on which the relations between products function as independent entities regulated 140 by the market laws independent of the commodity producer. It is only through the relationships of things (commodities) that their relationship to man is enacted as are the relationships of people and social groups to one another. Man is enslaved by the world of things and accumulated (past) labour dominates over live labour. As a result of this process uncovered by Karl Marx human activity and the human world appear as the world of things, in which things enter into independent, objective, properly material relationships.
p The reader might say that there is nothing extraordinary in this, since the discussion concerns the real physical world of nature. But according to Marx, thought is given form only through activity. Therefore the physical world of things, being independent, becomes the object of thinking and the goal of cognition only when the relations in the realm of activity function independently of the human and man himself functions as a thing. Until that time the entire physical world has been perceived as a symbol of the spiritual world. When, however, the activity is centred on the production of things of the independent material world, the world of nature is also apprehended as an entity independent of man. This world can be mastered only through understanding it, through discovering its properties and relationships existing independent of man. As Marx demonstrated this world of material relations dominating man is an alienated form of the world of man per se, just as the goal of human activity turns out in the end to be man himself rather than things. But for the member of bourgeois society this activity is directly subordinated to the relations between things. Following the logic of these relations activity itself becomes variously alienated from man in the form of algorithms, formulae, technology, etc., i.e., it begins to be regarded as something “thing-like”, mechanical. [140•1
p But after all this is a fundamental change in the mode of thought! To us today the authoritarian and “bookish” nature of medieval knowledge is astonishing. When the scholastics discussed a natural phenomenon they referred to the Holy Scriptures, the church authorities, the ancient philosophers; but they never turned to experiment, they never inquired of 141 nature itself. This was, by the way, quite consistent with medieval thought. Independent existence was granted only to the spiritual world while the world of things remained a dependent, determined aspect of the former. Therefore there was nothing to "inquire of nature”. It made more sense to inquire of religion which precisely represented a form of spiritual communion. Thus alchemists and astrologists saw behind the real relations of things secret and mystical ties governing these things, and resorted to rituals and magic in the nope of exerting an influence on these ties.
p It is only once man’s own activity appeared to him to be the activity of things that the material world was isolated in his consciousness from the spiritual world as an independent entity; the doctrine of the duality of truth arose and the protracted struggle waged by natural science against the church was initiated. At this point experiment becomes both possible and necessary, as a means of investigating the relationships between things as such. The study of nature gradually acquires the form of a science, and philosophy witnesses the emergence of materialistic notions based on mechanistic natural science and sharing the latter’s historical limitations.
p The mission and meaning of cognition now begin to be understood as the discovery of the laws governing the interactions of things in the form of abstract and universal relationships. With this goal in mind experiments are drawn up, the results of which are then “generalized”. The laws of science accumulated allegedly through the “generalization” of the sensual empeiria are interpreted as a direct representation of the "laws of nature" independent of man, of his history and modes of thought. Since the "limitations of human nature" somehow blur the picture received, they are of course an alien element in scientific knowledge, which must be got rid of as far as possible; in other words "knowledge must be purged of subjectivity”. Hence the distrust of fantasy and hypotheses and the homage paid to the “objective” empeiria and to the methods of adjusting it.
p Material production proper and the production of knowledge are now separatee from each other. Knowledge participates in production not as a process but as a "finished product" drawn from another sphere. Since this result must be transferred trom the sphere of cognition to that of practical application, it must be expressed in an informative and general form. In the world of material relations unmediate universality is expressed as an abstract, formal and mechanistic one, both in 142 material production as such and in logic. For that reason there exists the tendency to express knowledge in formal logic and symbolic structures. This is also facilitated by the division of labour which in any given sphere (with the exception of art) leads to a division into leaders and executors. In such a system knowledge acquires effective practical force only if it is articulated as a formalized system convenient for the elaboration of unambiguous and precise algorithms guiding behaviour. Finally, knowledge considered as a system embodying general results ready for application (viz., as a formal system: formulae, equations, projects, the technological process, etc.), becomes the product of theoretical production, while the materialization of intellectual labour becomes a thing, albeit a special one, in virtue of its universal character and the particular form of its consumption, which is connected with the fact that knowledge is the result of universal intellectual labour. This thing becomes a part of the general system of material relations.
p All of this leads to the situation under which precise natural science based on mechanics becomes a model ofsorts for other spheres of knowledge. Its research methods and theory constructs (including the relation to empeiria, formalization and mathematization) gradually pervade all spheres of cognition, imparting to them the specific form characterizing contemporary science.
p The completed revolutionary transformation of West European culture as a whole could be presented as a unique ‘turnabout” in consciousness, thought and the human psyche.
p In the Middle Ages knowledge of the subject, of the spirit (in the form of Christian religion, metaphysics, etc.) made claims to universality and endeavoured to explain all of nature, including its objective, material side (this explains, for example, the magical rites and incantations accompanying the alchemist’s production of chemical reactions).
p In modern times science becomes the predominant social form of knowledge as material relations oegin to dominate strictly human relations, and so the knowledge of the object, of matter (in the form of science and various materialist or "common sense" schools) lays claims to universality, encompassing all nature, including its subjective, spiritual side. This explains the idea of "man as machine" in its various (and in fact little differing) historical modifications, from seventeenth-century mechanics to contemporary cybernetics. It further explains the attempts to scientifically manipulate man.
143p The medieval world looked upon nature through the prism of the spirit; spirituality tinged the whole resultant picture. Consequently explanation was considered to be given to that which agreed with a certain spiritual goal (in the form of a “heavenly” goal). The contemporary European looks upon nature through the prism of matter; materiality tinges the picture of the world (world as matter in motion). That for which a material cause is found is to be explained. Endeavouring to explain something or other, the medieval thinker (and the medieval layman) tried to answer the question "what for?”. The scientist of today (and the man of common sense) accepts as explanation that which answers the question "why?”.
p Science rejects goal determination as unfounded teleology, mysticism and idealism. Its rationalism conciously relies upon experiment and upon that logic which represents a formally general scheme of material relations, relations of causality deprived of their dialectical correlate and opposition, i.e., goal relations. Such one-sided causality inevitably degenerates, in theoretical and scientific terms, into a quasi-spatial relationship, that is to say, into a structure in which temporal relationships are reduced to sequential relationships within some logical space.
p This leads to a “geometrization” of science and, on the one hand, is the basis for scientific prevision and practical might, and on the other, replaces explanation with description, investigation of process with analysis of structure. Therefore, for example, biology which is concerned with self-developing systems, i.e., with processes and expediences, is a difficult nut to crack for contemporary science.
p Engendered by the development of commodity capitalist production, science itself becomes a sphere of the division of labour and functions as a particular field for the professional activity of a narrow circle of people. It stands in opposition to the mass of individuals as an "external force" completely independent of their will and consciousness, as a "materialized force of knowledge" the plenipotentiaries of which are the scientists, who personify and thus monopolize this general force of knowledge, although in the final analysis it turns out to be a force for capital itself, standing in opposition to labour.
p At the same time, since science is a social institution, a system of social theoretical production, it is also opposed to each scientist as an "external force”, the more so because the division of labour and specialization penetrate more and more deeply into scientific production. We note the appearance ot divisions into theoreticians and experimenters, into creative 144 thinkers and functionaries. Science is more and more differentiated into specialized spheres and the scientist himself becomes more and more a narrow specialist.
p At the same time we observe a process of integration, a synthesis of separate specialized branches of science through both the elaboration of Dreader theories and the appearance of “generalizing” scientific disciplines (cybernetics, for example, aspires to the latter role). However, such integration does not eliminate the growing division of labour in science nor does it liquidate its effects, since, on the one hand, specialization continues within each branch of science and, on the other, “synthetic”, “generalizing” scientific disciplines bear the same abstractly universal nature, which also tends to turn the scholars engaged in such disciplines into narrow and one-sided specialists.
p All of this, together with the formalization and mathematization of science, leads us to conclude that in and of itself a professional concern with science is insufficient for the formation of the versatile individual. In fact scientific work itself begins to resemble industrial production in terms of its functional division of labour. Utilising the newest research techniques (e.g., accelerators) and data processing methods (e.g., computers) major scientific research centers work on the resolution of a given cluster of problems, while within this center there also exists a “technical” division of labour. In this fashion a professional concern with science forms the person as a "partial individual" with all the resulting consequences.
p A professional concern with science gradually leads the thought of the scientist to a formal system somewhat alienated from him and ultimately corresponding to the system of material relations, and forces him to act in accordance with its laws, to submit to it. On the contrary, creative ability and its corresponding aspect in the development of knowledge is expressed in the substantive movement of reflection. It can be formed and alienated only after it has led to a definite result and so after it has been subtracted, that is to say, when it is actually absent. This aspect represents the creation of the new, the development of new ideas and principles which can serve as the basis for new theories. Therefore in order to be innovative in science the scientist must free himself not only of old theory restricting his horizons and hardened into a formal system (in which the resolution of a theoretical problem is embodied in a collection of definite methods necessary for the realization of the given problem) but also from that mode of thought which seemed to him to be the only scientific one.
145p Movement within the framework of a formal system seems natural and normal for thought (the more so because within this system it is precisely the formal apparatus of theory which is applied in practice). Only a limited number of scientists succeed in overcoming this hurdle and in operating as the creators and inventors of new ideas, while the creative act itself turns out to be inexplicable within the framework of the accepted formalism. Therefore, this act is not brought to completion at the moment when, say, the scientist devotes his energies to the particular problem forcing himself to concentrate within the confines of logic, which he considers to be scientific. This is why the "scientists find out things first and then rather ineffectively muse on the way they were discovered". [145•1
p Scientific discoveries and theories within the system of commodity capitalist production are utilized for the improvement of this system, for its further standardization and automation. This leads to increments in labour productivity and in the volumes of goods, and consequently to further enslavement of live labour by accumulated (past) labour. The might of the social subject is intensified while the individual becomes more and more impoverished and standardized. Simultaneously all the negative sides of the division of labour grow more pronounced. Marx characterised this process in relation to science as follows: "...natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared numan emancipation, however directly and much it had to consummate dehumanizaticn". [145•2
In connection with this mass production and science (as the mass production of theoretical knowledge) launch an offensive, as it were, on the "eternal human values" (moral, aesthetic, etc.). A situation is created in which scientific thought develops to the detriment of morals.
Notes
[138•1] Marx often discussed the problem of the genetic ties between science and capitalist production. We refer here to only a few of his remarks. See K. Marx, Economic /intl Philosophic Manuscripts oj IH44, pp. 100-1 1, K. Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, Moscow, 1971, pp. 81, 268; K. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, pp. 390-91.
[139•1] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part III, Moscow, 1971, pp. 275-76.
[140•1] We shall not dwell at length on the problem of the materialization of activity, its interrelations and objectifications as well as its multiple social consequences. All this was worked out in detail by Marx. His arguments on this subject are especially numerous. We refer the reader to the summary article by G. S. Batishchev, "The Active Essence of Man as a Philosophical Principle”, in The Problem of Man in Contemporary Philosophy, Moscow, 1969 (in Russian).
[145•1] J. D. Bernal, Science in History, London, 1954, p. 11.
[145•2] K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 110.